The weather’s really gone wintry all of a sudden. The bakery is always cold, even at the height of summer, but now we’re really feeling the cold again. I always assumed it was a design feature – that the Victorians knew how to preserve food without fridges, so they made the bakery cream-cake-friendly. But actually that’s hogwash. It’s an idea cooked up in a bakery without any ovens.
In a Victorian bakery, or are we actually Edwardian? Well, whichever, in an OLD bakery, it really isn’t the point… but before energy efficiency was invented, with ovens whacking out heat almost 24 hours a day, heating wasn’t a priority. It was the urban equivalent of the aga, churning out heat as a bi-product of its actual job. So the place was always lovely and warm, just because it was a bakery.
It got me to thinking, though, this identity crisis of a cold bakery. It was one thing to believe it was intentional – that it had been designed that way as part and parcel of being a bakery, but to know that the cold is wrong, well, it’s unsettling. It’s like a closed theatre, or a Smoking Shelter at a hospital entrance.
Of course, both of those things are so taboo they actually don’t exist in our vocabulary. A theatre goes “dark” and smokers hide behind walls in case the Cessation Enforcement Officer catches them. Our brains cannot hold horribly contradictory ideas, we don’t like “wrongness.” A theatre with no show, and people killing themselves outside a hospital, we don’t accept such clashes.
So a bakery that isn’t warm and cozy, isn’t welcoming, comfortable, and delicious-smelling? Is that a problem? Is that ever going to fit in our brains? Are our visitors going away with a blind spot in their memories, blanking out the impossible contradiction? Do they remember us as “the bakery that needs an oven” or “that strange cold place”? Do they go home determined to help us buy our oven, to create a warm heart for anfield again? Or do they, as all humans do, fall into the trap of the “cognitive miser”?
Humans apparently have done so well as a species because we are lazy thinkers. In our early evolution, we didn’t waste mental energy on things that are too much work (“why bison run this way every rainfall time?” “why some berries taste good?” “why Venus of Willendorf make my man-parts excite?”) we just get on with the thoughts that achieve something (hunt it, eat it, mate with it).
so I do sometimes worry that the cognitive dissonance involved in a freezing cold bakery is too much for our visitors to carry away. I’m not saying they’re dumb, I’m saying we’re presenting people with something that tells them not to stay – a closed theatre isn’t one you go back to, and a hospital swarming with nurses and cardiologists having a sly fag, well it hardly inspires faith. If your local bakery can’t bake you a loaf, let alone warm your bones…
